[maltaille]

Seeing this bump brought me over here for the first time, and Dominic was nice enough to invite me in, I guess I'll throw my opinion in too.

I used to be a big fan of Vachss' stuff, but unfortunately while when he's good he's very, very good, when he's bad he justifies all the contempt out there for genre fiction. I think he lost it several years ago. Burke especially is a caricature of his former self, and most of his other stuff takes itself so seriously that it makes me cringe, despite some really slick writing in places.

Vachss has always said that he doesn't consider himself a writer, it's just something he does because it furthers his cause, which is improving the conditions for abused children. Writing books gave him an opportunity to take a shot at the conditions that he believes cause the problem, rather than just helping each individual child as he can (which is why he wrote a Batman novel. It reached an audience his other stuff never would. It's not so weird, Batman is just as close a descendant of Philip Marlowe as Arkady Renko or Harry Bosch are).

I can appreciate this as a worthy cause, but about the same time he started producing comic books (thats not a metaphor, he does actually write comics as well) he went over the edge, and his prose started turning people away from his message. If you can't recommend his stuff, you can't spread his word.

Which is a pity, because I think his first half-dozen or so novels were some of the best noir stuff written in the late eighties. He's not so much in the Spenser vein (though Spenser has the same problem these days, he and Hawk are supermen) as Richard Stark's Parker (remember Payback, with Mel Gibson? This was an adaptation of the first Parker novel) or Garry Disher's Wyatt. Really spare writing, criminal protagonists who are so professional they've left some of their humanity behind, and worlds where there are no good guys. There's nothing refined about Burke. He's a pit bull who would rather hit first and get home alive than see whether there's a need to fight in the first place.

The first one, Flood, is a little shaky - I don't think he'd quite figured out who Burke is yet - but the second, Strega, and probably up to Sacrifice are fantastic. Then Max starts turning into the deadliest man alive, Burke starts getting laid more than James Bond (and the sex starts getting a little misogynistic), and I start wondering whether some intern is actually knocking these out while Vachss works the talk show circuit. You're getting the soup Mama serves to customers, not the stuff she keeps for family.

A few of the non-Burke ones are worthwhile though. Shella has already been mentioned, Getaway Man is ok, and a lot of the short stories in Born Bad and Everybody Pays work. But once you've been through those switch to Richard Stark, or James Ellroy, or Lawrence Block, or F Paul Wilson, or early Elmore Leonard.